“I thought I’d made it clear this whole conversation is out of school,” Fowler said.
“With all respect to General Pickering, and his former subordinate, the officer who prepared this assessment, I’m having a great deal of trouble placing much credence in it.”
“See here, Admiral—” Pickering flared.
“Flem, let him finish,” Fowler said sharply.
“For one thing,” Hillenkoetter went on, “I can’t believe that General Willoughby would suppress something like this, and for another, as I said before, I’ve received nothing remotely approaching this assessment from my own people in the Orient.”
“So?” Fowler asked.
“On the other hand, it comes to me not only from a . . . the former . . . deputy director of the OSS for the Pacific, but via a senator, for whom I not only have a great deal of respect, but who apparently believes there is something to the assessment. Under that circumstance, I will immediately take action to see what I can find out myself.”
“How?” Pickering asked, sarcastically. “By sending Willoughby a radio message?”
“Flem, goddamn it!” Fowler said.
“By dispatching my deputy director for Asiatic Activities—your replacement, so to speak, General—over there as soon as I can get him on a plane, with instructions to— what was your phrase, General? ‘light a fire’?—light a fire under our people in Hong Kong, Taipei, and Seoul to refresh their efforts.”
“All right,” Fowler said.
“It would facilitate things if they could talk with the author of this,” Hillenkoetter went on, tapping his fingertips on the assessment. “To do that, I’d have to have his name.”
“Flem?” Fowler asked.
Pickering thought it over.
“No,” he said, finally, “for a number of reasons, primarily because everything he knows is in the assessment. What they would really want from him is his sources, and I don’t think he’d be willing to tell them.”
“We’re supposed to be on the same side, General,” Hillenkoetter said.
“I’m not entirely convinced of that, frankly,” Pickering said. “Anyway, my . . . friend . . . would not give up his sources unless I told him to, and I’m not willing to do that. At least, right now.”
Hillenkoetter shrugged.
“I may keep this, right?” he asked, tapping the assessment again.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Pickering said. “Could I have your word that you’ll use it to pose specific questions—about the order of battle, that sort of thing?—I mean, that you won’t turn it over as is to your people? They wouldn’t have to be rocket scientists to figure out who wrote it if they had the entire document.”
“And we wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?” Hillenkoetter asked. “It might wind up in the newspapers.”
Fowler smiled.
“You have my word, General,” Hillenkoetter said. “And would you agree, Senator, that we don’t have to worry the President about this just now?”
“Not for the time being,” Fowler said, and rose from his chair. “Thank you, Admiral, for your consideration, and for seeing us on short notice. And I’ll expect to hear from you shortly, right?”
“Absolutely,” Hillenkoetter said, and offered his hand to Pickering.
“It was a pleasure to meet you, General.”
“Was it really?” Pickering asked.
Hillenkoetter laughed, a little uneasily, and walked Pickering and Fowler to his office door.
As he watched them walk through his outer office, there was an unexpected bulletin from his memory bank.
Christ! The Gobi Desert weather station. The OSS— Pickering—put that in, in the middle of Japanese-occupied Mongolia. Nobody thought he could do it, much less keep it up. But he did, right through the end of the war. The B-29 bombing of the Japanese home islands could not have taken place without it. And we’re still using it.
Whatever else Pickering may be, he’s no amateur. Maybe there is something to this assessment.
But why would Charley Willoughby sit on it?
He became aware that Mrs. Warburg, his executive assistant, was looking at him, waiting for orders.
“Call Mr. Jacobs, please, Mrs. Warburg,” he said. “Ask him to come up as soon as he can. And call transportation and start working on tickets for him to Hong Kong.”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
He started to close his office door, but she held it open.
Then she stepped inside the office and closed the door.
“Admiral, the tape recorder didn’t get shut down,” she said.
He looked at her.
“There was something in your voice when you said to shut it down,” she said.
“You heard that conversation?” he asked.
She nodded.
“No, you didn’t, Martha,” he said. “And I want you personally to get that tape, shred it, and burn it. And make sure there are no copies.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Do I get to read the assessment?”
“It’s on my desk. You can read it, but I want zero copies made.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You did the right thing, Martha,” Hillenkoetter said. “But this . . . situation . . . is extraordinary.”
“Yes, sir,” Mrs. Warburg said, and walked to his desk to read the assessment.
IV
[ONE]
THE WILLIAM BANNING HOUSE 66 SOUTH BATTERY CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA 1630 17 JUNE 1950
When they saw the Buick station wagon pull to the curb, both “Mother” Banning and her daughter-in-law, “Luddy,” rose from the rocking chairs in which they had been sitting. Mother Banning folded her hands on her stomach. Luddy Banning clapped hers together, producing a sound like a pistol shot, and then, a moment later, a dignified, gray-haired black man in a gray cotton jacket appeared from inside the house.
“Ma’am?”
“Stanley, our guests have arrived,” Luddy Banning said. “Please inform the colonel, and send someone to take care of their car and luggage.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mother Banning and Luddy Banning were the mother and the wife, respectively, of Colonel Edward J. Banning, USMC, who was both commanding officer of Marine Barracks, Charleston, and Adjunct Professor of Naval Science at his alma mater, officially the Military College of South Carolina, but far better known as the Citadel.
Colonel Banning was a graduate of the Citadel, (’26) as his father (’05), grandfather (’80), and great-grandfather (’55) had been. On April 12, 1861, Great-Grandfather Matthew Banning had stood where Mother and Luddy Banning now stood on the piazza and watched as the first shots of the War of the Secession were fired on Fort Sumter.
He had then gone off as a twenty-five-year-old major to command the 2nd Squadron of the 2nd South Carolina Dragoons. When released from Union captivity in 1865, the conditions of his release required him to swear fealty to the United States of America, and to remove the insignia of a major general from his gray Confederate uniform. For the rest of his life, however, he was addressed as General Banning, and referred to by his friends as “The General.”
Grandfather Matthew Banning, Jr., had answered the call of his friend Theodore Roosevelt and gone off to the Spanish American War as a major with the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry. Family legend held that Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Banning had been one of the only two First Volunteer Cavalry officers actually to be astride a horse during the charge up Kettle and San Juan Hills. There was a large oil painting of that engagement in the living room of the house on the Battery, showing Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Banning and Colonel Theodore Roosevelt leading the charge. For the rest of his life, he was addressed as Colonel and referred to by his friends as “The Colonel.”
Matthew Banning III elected to accept a commission in the Cavalry of the Regular Army of the United States on his graduation from the Citadel in June 1905, the alternative being going to work for his father in one or another of the B
anning family businesses. He had been a first lieutenant for twelve years when the United States entered World War I in 1917. When the Armistice was signed the next year, the silver eagles of a full colonel of the Tank Corps were on the epaulets of his tunic, and a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts were on the chest.
With The Colonel still running the family businesses, Colonel Banning III remained in service after the war, even though it meant accepting a reduction from colonel to major. By 1926, he had been repromoted to colonel, and on the parade ground at the Citadel had sworn his son, Edward J. Banning, into the United States Marine Corps as a second lieutenant upon his graduation from the Citadel.
Like his father before him, Matthew Banning III had been addressed as Colonel for the rest of his life, and referred to by his friends as “The Colonel.”
The Colonel lived long enough (1946) to see his first grandson, and his son—with the eagles of a Marine colonel on his epaulets—assigned as a Professor of Military Science at the Citadel.
For a while, the likelihood of either thing happening had seemed remote. For one thing, Edward Banning had not married as the next step after graduating from the Citadel, as had all his antecedents.
He was thirty-six, a captain serving with the 4th Marines in Shanghai, before he marched to the altar, and that only days before he went to the Philippines with the 4th Marines, leaving his White Russian bride in Shanghai at the mercy—if that word applied at all—of the Japanese.
Captain Banning was blinded by Japanese artillery in the Philippines and evacuated by submarine. His sight returned, and he was given duties he would not talk about, but which The Colonel understood meant Intelligence with a capital I.
Once, on the piazza of the house on the Battery, just before he went—for the fourth or fifth time—to the war in the Orient, then Major Banning confided in The Colonel that, realistically, he held little hope that he would ever see his wife again. There had been no word of her at all.
And then, in May of 1943, when by then Lieutenant Colonel Banning was “somewhere in the Pacific” there had been a telephone call from the Hon. Zachary W. Westminister III (D., 3rd District, S.C.), a Citadel classmate.
“Matty, you sitting down?”
“No, actually, I’m not.”
“Matty, ol’ buddy, you better sit down.”
It didn’t sound as if ol’ Zach was going to relate bad news about Eddie, but The Colonel had been worried nevertheless.
“I’m sitting, Zach, now get on with it.”
“I just came from meeting with the President,” Congressman Westminister began, “and I can only tell you a little. . . .”
“Get on with it, goddamn it, Zach!”
“When you get off the phone, you go tell ’Lisbeth to change the sheets in the guest room. Your daughter-in-law will shortly be arriving.”
“My God!”
“And if you still have a crib in the attic, you better dust that off, too. She’s coming with Edward Edwardovich Banning in her arms.”
“You’re telling me there’s a baby?”
“Edward Edwardovich—how ’bout that?—Banning. Born August 1942, somewhere in Mongolia.”
“Goddamn, Zach!”
“When I know more, I’ll be in touch. The President just gave the order to put the two of them on a plane from Chunking.”
Elizabeth Banning didn’t say anything, of course—she was a Christian gentlewoman—but The Colonel knew that once the situation changed from Ed having married some White Russian in Shanghai who would probably never be heard from again, to having Ed’s White Russian wife and their baby about to arrive at the house on the Battery, she naturally had concerns about what she would be like, how they would fit into Charleston society.
The former Maria Catherine Ludmilla Zhikov had come down the steps from the Eastern Airlines DC-3 looking far more like a photograph from Town & Country than a refugee who had spent seventeen months moving across China and Mongolia in pony-drawn carts, pausing en route for several days to be delivered of a son.
Her Naval Air Transport Service flight from China to the United States had been met at San Francisco by Mrs. Fleming Pickering, who transported her and the baby to the Foster San Franciscan hotel where the proprietors of the in-hotel Chic Lady clothing shop and the across-the-street Styles for the Very Young baby clothes emporium were waiting for her.
“I knew the moment I laid eyes on Luddy that she was a lady,” Mrs. Elizabeth Banning said at the time—and many times later.
“If I had arrived in Charleston looking like I looked when I got off the plane in San Francisco,” Luddy Banning said later—after The Colonel had gone to his reward, she herself had become “The Colonel’s Wife” and Elizabeth Banning had acceded, much like Queen Elizabeth’s mother, to the title “Mother Banning”—“Mother Banning would have had a heart attack. Thank God for Patricia Pickering.”
Behind her back—not derisively or pejoratively— Luddy Banning was known as “the countess,” not only because she had a certain regal air about her, but also because a Citadel cadet doing a term paper on the organization of the Russian Imperial general staff had gone to The Colonel’s Russian wife for help with it.
The colonel’s Russian wife, while perusing one of the cadet’s reference works, had laid a finger on the name of Lieutenant General Count Vasily Ivanovich Zhivkov, and softly said, “My father.”
That announcement had taken no longer than twenty-four hours to become common knowledge among the cadets of the Citadel, another twenty-four hours to circulate among the faculty, and another twenty-four hours to reach the houses along the Battery.
Luddy Banning descended the wide stairs and walked down the brick sidewalk through the cast-iron fence to the Buick and waited until Captain Kenneth R. McCoy, USMC—who was wearing a yellow polo shirt and khaki trousers—got from behind the wheel, then wrapped her arms around him.
“Our savior,” she said, seriously.
“Ah, come on, Luddy!”
“You were our savior, you will always be our savior,” she said. “Welcome to our home!”
She kissed McCoy twice, once on each cheek, and then went around the front of the Buick and embraced Ernie.
“How nice to see you again, Major McCoy,” Mother Banning said, offering him her hand.
“It’s Captain McCoy, ma’am,” McCoy said. “It’s good to see you, too.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” a male voice boomed from beside the wide staircase. “Look what the tide washed up!”
Without realizing he was doing it—literally a Pavlovian reaction—McCoy saluted the tall, stocky, erect, starting-to -bald man, who had a blond eight-year-old boy straddling his neck.
“Colonel,” he said.
“Goddamn, Ken, you of all people know me well enough to call me by my name.”
He walked quickly to McCoy, his hand extended to shake McCoy’s, then changed his mind and embraced him.
“It’s good to see you,” McCoy said.
“Come on in the house, Stanley’ll take care of the bags and the car. I think a small—hell, large—libation is in order. ”
He looked at his wife, who was coming around the front of the car with her arm around Ernie McCoy.
“Hey, beautiful lady,” he called. “Welcome to Charleston.”
“Hello, Ed,” Ernie said. “Thank you, it’s good to be here.”
They all went up the stairs as Stanley, the dignified black man, and a younger black man came down the stairs.
“I put the wine in the sitting room, Colonel,” he said to Banning.
“Just the wine?”
“No, sir,” Stanley said. “Not just the wine.”
“Good man, Stanley.”
“These glasses are . . . exquisite,” Ernie said, as Ed Banning poured champagne in her engraved crystal glass.
“They’ve been in the family a long time,” Mother Banning said. “We only bring them out for special people.”
“Thank you,” Ernie said.
/> “The general bought them in Europe before the war,” Mother Banning said. “On his wedding trip.”
Ed Banning saw the confusion on Ernie’s face.
“Mother refers, of course, to the War of Secession,” he said. “These glasses spent the war buried on the island, which always made me wonder if my great-grandfather had as much faith in the inevitable victory of the Confederacy as he professed at the time.”
“Edward, what a terrible thing to say,” Mother Banning said.
“Mother, as it says in the Good Book, the ‘truth shall make you free.’ ”
There was polite laughter.
“Speaking of the truth,” Banning said. “Let me get this out of the way before we get down to serious drinking. The general called—Ken’s and my general, Mother—and let me know what’s going on. We’re family, in my mind. . . .”
“And mine,” Luddy said. “This family wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for our savior.”
“Hear, hear,” Banning said. “Anyway, I want you both to know that what’s ours is yours, anything we can do to help, we will, and we can either talk about it or not. Your choice.”
“I’m going to cry,” Ernie said.
“Drink your booze,” Colonel Banning said, and then had another thought: “One more thing, Ken. Ernie Zimmerman, the best-dressed master gunner in the Marine Corps.”
“What about him?”
“I wanted to ask you before I asked him and Mae-Su down from Beaufort. You want to see him?”
“Wouldn’t that be an imposition?” Ernie asked. “Ken and I talked about going down there to see them on our way to California.”
“You weren’t listening, beautiful lady,” Colonel Banning said. He turned to the butler, who was in the act of opening a second bottle of Moët et Chandon extra brut. “Stanley, see if you can get Mister Zimmerman on the horn for me, will you?”
“Mae-Su is my sister, Ernie,” Luddy Banning said, in gentle reproof. “She is always welcome in our home.”
Master Gunner Ernest W. Zimmerman, USMC, his wife Mae-Su, and their five children arrived at 66 South Battery two hours later. At Mae-Su’s insistence, the entire family was dressed in a manner Mrs. Zimmerman felt was appropriate to visit—as she described them privately to her husband—“the ladies in Charleston.”
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